Low-cost, long-life, simple VOIP phone controller?

[Just Someone YKnow]

I am quite annoyed to see that the Cisco BE6000S is going EOL in 2022. We JUST had this stupid thing installed in 2017 and I now discover it has only a 5 year lifespan before Cisco is forcing it into obsolescence. We are not a wealthy enough organization to be constantly padding Cisco's stock price.

I need a phone controller that simply does VOIP within a single building and will store messages for about 60 phones, maybe with an entirely flash based filesystem. And has a supported lifespan of at least 10 years from the time of purchase.

Though I expect to hear laughter for making such a request. For our fiscally conservative needs, I am probably going to have to dump Cisco and start looking into Mitel, or maybe even Asterisk on an Ubuntu Linux VM.

[balaji.bandi]

If i were you for the 60 Phones, feel cisco is expensive i  can start work with FusionPBX ( i was part of it some time back when the developer started developing and contributed couple of testings and codes).

it is Freeswitch based distro, works like charm for small users, it has all the feature what you looking for small corporate organisation,

[R0g22]

Not sure why would you buy a BE6k for 60 users only.
If that is the case though, look into a CME/CUE bundle running on a ISR-4k box. If you have a virtual environment, you can deploy a vCUE for the voicemail bit.
Also, you could look into BE4k for a cloud based management.

[Jaime Valencia]

I doubt you will find such system which will be supported for 10 years without needing to at least keep upgrading something to remain with support.

Ubuntu 18.04.1 which is the LTS guarantees support until April 2023

Latest version of asterisk, same thing, 2023: https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Asterisk+Versions

If you run ESXi, most likely you'll be forced to upgrade to a new version and pay new licenses.

You're free to keep using your BE6Ks well after it's EOL/EOS and it should keep running, up to the latest version you are able to install on that HW. I've seen some people still use and ask about CUCM 4.x and that version is around 12 years old, and long past the EOS/EOL.

[Leo Laohoo]

---

@Just Someone YKnow wrote:

And has a supported lifespan of at least 10 years from the time of purchase.

---

Not remotely possible with Asterisk.  Each Asterisk version is only "good" for about 3 years. 

Granted, one can use Asterisk for 10 years but any updates will be long gone.  With current state of exploits and vulnerabilities, I wouldn't take that risk of running an Asterisk system without any upgrade.  And I don't really care how good the firewall, IPS/IDS system is.

[Just Someone YKnow]

(I can reply to a thread via email? Weird.)

OK, (laughter), the point here is not that the product version stays the
same but that I’m not charged for my firstborn to simply maintain a simple
little voip controller with voicemail for a tiny organization.

I am at the point where I pretty much do not trust Cisco vendors as they
use the customer’s lack of technical knowledge to oversell expensive
technology they don’t need, with features far beyond anything they will
ever be able to utilize, and with an extremely short life cycle.

That is where I sit right now with this BE6000S that we have, which when I
asked Cisco technical phone support for help with it they said, “um, why do
you have that, It’s designed to support 20,000 phones and you have 60.”

Well it’s what our local Cisco vendor recommended. I don’t know what all of
the products are that Cisco sells. I am leaving it up to the vendor to tell
me what’s appropriate but apparently they’re just in it to charge us as
much as possible and get out of Dodge.

I’m additionally annoyed by the fact that there is no way to have the
BE6000S do a controlled shut down on a UPS, because it is such a high end
enterprise gizmo that it is designed to basically never ever power off for
any reason.

But I can’t provide 24/7 power coverage for the thing, so if we have a
power failure it just crashes and there’s nothing I can do about it. I do
make backups anyway. And I’ve considered pulling the drives and doing a
block level drive image of it with CloneZilla, in case it does crash and
kill itself some evening.

So yeah I’m just sick of Cisco’s overpriced, short lifespan crap and being
scammed by their “partners”. If I could just do business directly with
Cisco perhaps things might go better.

So, in reply to your comment, if we were to get the free Asterisk and I
have to do a free upgrade once a year or two .... um woo.
--
Dale Mahalko -- Tech Support, Network Admin
Lake Holcombe School District, Holcombe, WI
(715) 595-4241 x 275

[Jaime Valencia]

That is where I sit right now with this BE6000S that we have, which when I asked Cisco technical phone support for help with it they said, “um, why do you have that, It’s designed to support 20,000 phones and you have 60.”

If that's what you were told, that's absolutely wrong, see here:

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/unified-communications/business-edition-6000/index.html#~stickynav=3

You in fact, got the smallest solution possible with CUCM and CUC.

The next option would have been an ISR with CME and CUE, which would also eventually EOLed in regards to the HW.

[balaji.bandi]

Most the people given their views, now you need to make a business call what is to be deployed.

cost vs support vs brand.  ( cisco also have lower end CME on the routers which also give you same feature waht you looking for)

If you not able to put that kind of investment you need to look what i have suggested. less capex / quick RoI / medium Opex

since investing less cost here on Opensouce based PBX, you can deploy HA, so your Patching is each.

I am do not have any intention to push you away from Cisco product, but iam more of cost justfication.

[Jrsac]

I know that a few months have gone by; but, I feel your pain.  We bought a UC560 a few years ago and the very next year EOL was announced on it.  I really like the UC560 for a small business phone system; but, I guess Cisco didn't like it well enough to make a new model.  Seems like they are pushing toward bigger systems.  While they have a BE4000 now, it doesn't support soft phones, according to what I can find, which some of our staff need that are working from home at times -- why would they make a phone system with no remote client for laptops?

Did you wind up going with the BE6000 or something else?  Just curious as I have to look for a replacement for the UC560.  Thanks. Joe

[Just Someone YKnow]

Well, we are currently at the BE6000S. We also had a UC560 previously, and the BE6000S was the only upgrade route recommended. Bought it and of course as usual with Cisco, about 1.5 years later in 2017 it started the 5 year EOL forced death cycle, coming up in 2022.

I am currently looking into Digium SwitchVOX or maybe FreePBX based on Digium's free Asterisk.

We are a tiny organization with a single VOIP controller. We are not coordinating internal extension calling between multiple buildings/office spread across a city. We just need a 75 phone / 5 POTS lines, one-controller VOIP PBX solution with about 30 minutes of voicemail per phone. Probably could do this with a Raspberry Pi.

We don't need a PBX that is also at the same time also spec'd out to be a Hyper-Unified Psychokinetic Mindmeld Omnicommunicator with brain-link interfacing (additional product licensing fees will apply for capabilities beyond the base PBX messaging).

We are also a very naughty Cisco customer because we don't religiously buy SmartNet annually for every single device we own. Yep, the switches and phones and wifi... no SmartNet is active on any of it, because it just costs too much. (Supposedly Cisco has some sort of free limited lifetime hardware replacement warranty for its switches like Hewlett Packard Enterprise/Aruba, but I expect it's just smoke and mirrors if I ever actually need it.)

Our BE6000S currently has a VMWare boot problem where it gets stuck waiting for a systems management driver to load, and takes over an hour to move past that point and actually finish booting...

I have requested we get the SmartNet renewed for $2500 to fix that, but the decision has come down... "well, that's a lot of money for support. it IS only an hour it's taking to boot, we can just wait it out."

Also I continue to love how Cisco adamantly refuses to allow, accept, or acknowledge that there is any way for the BE6000S to ever perform an automatic safe shutdown in the event of a power failure and the thing is now running on battery backup.

It is simply impossible to do an automated safe shutdown. You must buy a generator and keep it powered on at all times. The BE6000S can only ever be manually shutdown via the command line of an anointed admin's blessed hands.

Nevermind the fact that the BE6000S is merely running VMWare and there is an APC Powerchute Network Shutdown image specifically for VMWare that can be installed alongside CUC01 / CUCM01 that will enable exactly this. And don't you dare just install this yourself on the BE6000S, and violate the Cisco stated manual shutdown only policy.

It is a apparently better Cisco policy to let the BE6000S simply crash when the UPS battery runs out, than to install APC PowerChute and enable Guest Shutdown for CUC01 / CUCM01.  And it's not really Cisco's fault for not supporting automatic safe shutdown. No, shame on you for not spending $30,000+ for a dedicated onsite generator and fuel storage, to keep the BE6000S powered on at all times, regardless of any other financial concerns.

I'm afraid the spark has gone out of this marriage.

[jason-mcgee]

Just Someone YKnow,

I feel your pain, but one thing never mentioned is that if you have a stable Cisco product, you can run it far beyond it's EOL. I have recently been employed by a company that was running CUCM 6.1 for about 8 years past it's EOL. There were only 500 phones on the system and it was used for extremely basic service for calls and voicemail. None of the bells and whistles were used. The servers themselves are still running to this day and are working fine. They haven't been rebooted in roughly 2400 days the last I checked. There were no contracts remaining for maintenance obviously, and there certainly was a risk, with no support, but there were never any major issues. Based upon what you have described, you aren't using it for anything that would require a lot intricacies and it should run for a very, very long time. You can get all kinds of refurbished parts and phones that work just fine for a relatively cheap price. Since you mentioned that they don't care if the phones are down for an hour, you are probably in a very good situation as long as you can back up the software and reinstall it if you had to.

The vendor issue is a huge problem and I agree with you completely, I ran into the exact same issue with the first Cisco procurement I made and we spent a lot of money on things we did not need.

Since you have already purchased it, I personally would just run it until there was no other course of action as long as I had a back up and spare hardware just in case and even though TAC won't support you, you would still have this forum to help you through any major issues. The caveat being that you have a backup of the software and spare hardware just in case. I wouldn't be surprised if it ran until 2035.

[Just Someone YKnow]

Yes I agree with you about possibly continuing past the hardware end of life.

Due to the fact that although it is all weird custom prioprietary Cisco stuff and I do not have any install media that was provided to us by the company that installed it for us (??) .... if the BE6000S is really running just plain old VMWare with Cisco's name slapped on it, then I should be able to make a direct physical copy of the VMWare boot drive, and stop the VMs and make a copy of the VMs, to stash away in a cupboard on a couple archival hard drives, or external RAID USB drive.

In the event of future hardware failure, I should be able to just reload these backed-up VMs, restore a CUCM / CUC backup (occurring automatically every day), and away we go.

[Jaime Valencia]

The BE4K, even if it's named as a Business Edition product, is quite different from any of the BE6K options or BE7K, it's an on-prem ISR, which is cloud managed. And it's doesn't run CUCM nor IM&P, that's why there is no option for soft clients.

If you want an on-prem solution, you would need to use CUCM + IM&P, and depending on those soft clientes either VPN or MRA. Either as an appliance, or on your own ESXi servers.

If you choose to go cloud, you could use Webex, Webex Calling, the new UCM cloud offering, or UCM over VMWare on AWS.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collaboration/unified-communications-manager-cloud/index.html

In any case, I suggest you have this conversation with a Cisco partner who holds UC specializations (You can use the partner locator for this) to make sure they can properly size and explain you the current alternatives.

The UC560 was CME + CUE, and you can still use those if you get an ISR 4K.

[Jrsac]

Thanks for the help and advice.  Also, for clearing up why the BE4K doesn't support soft clients.  I couldn't figure that one out.  I don't think I have an option with mine like Just Someone YKnow has with his to possibly make a backup and run on another server.  I will start looking at options for a replacement phone system and appreciate understanding a little better what Cisco has in this space for on-premise.  I am hopeful that if we go this way, it won't be EOL soon.  Partner lookup has option for Collaboration technology and a couple of choices for collaboration under specializations.